Return to the water analogy and you can name the three forces that govern the whole system. Culture is the demand: what people actually want to send and receive. Connectivity is the network: the pipes that carry it. Capacity is the constraint: how much water can move before something breaks.

For most of the internet’s history, capacity was the binding constraint, so culture adapted to it: we compressed, we queued, we waited. As capacity expanded, culture rushed to fill it, which is why we now send video as casually as we once sent text. Connectivity is the variable that quietly resets what culture treats as normal.

The trouble is that synthetic traffic consumes real capacity while contributing no culture. It is water with no thirst behind it: pressure in the pipes that no human ever asked for.